Portable Holonomic Educational Robot Platform for Home Laboratory—Study Case: AI-Based Electromyography Control

The post-pandemic evolution of education involving mechatronics and machine learning has shifted the demand for robotic hardware from centralized laboratories to accessible laboratories in home environments. This paper presents a portable three-wheeled holonomic robotic platform designed for remote research and home office experimentation. The proposed system utilizes a modular design and low-cost philosophy comprising a custom embedded control system driven by an ESP32-WROOM microcontroller, which manages a closed-loop PID velocity controller using Hall effect feedback from three DC micromotors. In contrast, external nodes allow the reception, conditioning, and classification of 8-channel surface electromyography (sEMG) data sampled at 500 Hz. To address the non-stationarity and stochastic noise in raw sEMG signals, this study implements a hybrid Deep Learning (DL) architecture that complements 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for spatial feature extraction with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for temporal context awareness. This model decodes the neuromuscular intent of the user into real-time holonomic velocity vectors, achieving validation accuracies of 80.51% for horizontal movement, 84.86% for vertical translation, and 99.56% for the Fist/no-Fist state. By synthesizing advanced AI-based teleoperation with a portable design, this study establishes a scalable framework for the next generation of “laboratory-at-home” educational tools and research regardless of physical location.